Comparing 11 vs 13 inch

Hi all,

A very simple question I'd like to ask:

I have an 11 and 13 inch macbook air with essentially identical specs on CPU (i5) and GPU (HD 4000). Given that the 13 inch will have the higher resolution because it has a bigger screen, would it be correct to assume that a game such as WoW will run at marginally better FPS on the 11 inch than on the 13 inch? Or is this just plain wrong and it would be same.

Yes, games will run faster on lower resolution. But... Here's a big but...

I had a 12" laptop, not meant for gaming but a proper small light-weight work laptop. It's great for portability, but the screen size is way way too small for frequent gaming. You have to play with face on the screen squinting for hours in uncomfortable position. I would never buy a laptop meant mainly or exclusively for gaming smaller than 17" and even that is pushing it. And if you ever even think about doing something serious with the laptop like for example photo editing or spreadsheets, you'll forever curse the day you were stupid enough to buy a tiny screen laptop useless for work. Ultraportables are meant to be ultraportable, not ultra-usable.

Originally Posted by n0cturnal

Does it really have a higher resolution? Bigger screen does not equal higher resolution.

Yeah, 11" has 1366x768 16:9 resolution, 13" is 1440x900 16:10.

Last edited by vesseblah; 2013-02-08 at 10:52 PM.

Never going to log into this garbage forum again as long as calling obvious troll obvious troll is the easiest way to get banned.
Trolling should be.

I have an 11 and 13 inch macbook air with essentially identical specs on CPU (i5) and GPU (HD 4000). Given that the 13 inch will have the higher resolution because it has a bigger screen, would it be correct to assume that a game such as WoW will run at marginally better FPS on the 11 inch than on the 13 inch? Or is this just plain wrong and it would be same.

Thanks

airs + gaming = bad combo (unless you like really low settings/resolution even then raiding will be a PITA)

Is it really just as simple as this? Can someone confirm this is definitely correct? Thanks!

It's not exactly like that, but close enough. Various things like memory usage of textures affect it but those are impossible to estimate in advance and vary from game to game.

Big exception would be some crappy console port internally always rendering screen at 1280x720 size because that's the maximum Xbox360 outputs, and it's simply scaled to either 1366x768 or 1440x900. In that case it would run almost exactly as fast on both computers. Also emulators do this because old consoles ran at even lower resolutions. None of this applies to WoW though, and you will see around 15-20% drop in framerate on the 13" model vs 11" when all other hardware and software settings are the same.

Never going to log into this garbage forum again as long as calling obvious troll obvious troll is the easiest way to get banned.
Trolling should be.

It's not exactly like that, but close enough. Various things like memory usage of textures affect it but those are impossible to estimate in advance and vary from game to game.

Big exception would be some crappy console port internally always rendering screen at 1280x720 size because that's the maximum Xbox360 outputs, and it's simply scaled to either 1366x768 or 1440x900. In that case it would run almost exactly as fast on both computers. Also emulators do this because old consoles ran at even lower resolutions. None of this applies to WoW though, and you will see around 15-20% drop in framerate on the 13" model vs 11" when all other hardware and software settings are the same.